MinistryPlatform Full

This maintenance plan makes a backup of the MinistryPlatform and Report Server databases. The Full backup contains everything you need to restore these databases on a different server or to fully overwrite the databases on the existing server. With the Full backup, you can restore to the time the backup occurred.

MinistryPlatform Log

This maintenance plan makes a transaction log backup of the MinistryPlatform and Report Server databases. The Transaction Log backup contains a record of all modifications made to the database since the last Transaction Log backup. The Transaction Log backup is important for several reasons.

With the Transaction Log backup, you can replay the transactions to restore them to a specific point in time. You can do this if you have a full backup and the entire chain of Transaction Log backups between the time of the full backup and the necessary point in time. If Transaction Log backups are not working, you can't restore to a point in time.

For Transaction Log backups to work, a database must operate in Full Recovery Mode. In Full Recovery Mode, SQL stores a copy of every transaction (anything that modifies the database) in the database's Transaction Log file (typically the file with a .ldf extension). The Transaction Log continues to grow until a Transaction Log Backup occurs. The Transaction Log backup copies the contents from the Transaction Log file then shortens the Transaction Log contents. If Transaction Log backups are not working, the Transaction Log database file continues to grow until the disk fills up. A Full backup does not shorten the Transaction Log database file, but it does back up the contents of the Transaction Log. So if the Transaction Log is very large, the size of the Full backups will also be large and fill up the server's storage even faster.

MinistryPlatform Weekly

This job has nothing to do with backups, but a backup is made during the process. MinistryPlatform Weekly is all about database optimization. It rebuilds indexes and updates statistics to keep MinistryPlatform working at peak efficiency. It also shrinks the MinistryPlatform database to remove unnecessary white space. Database optimization tasks create a lot of transactions, so the job also runs a Transaction Log backup to shorten the Transaction Logs before it starts the database shrink. This keeps the optimization operations from significantly increasing database size.